A framework by Johan Schot and Laur Kanger (2018) theorising very long-term, large-scale change across many socio-technical systems at once. They argue that over roughly the past 250 years, systems like energy, mobility and food have co-evolved in a shared direction governed by a limited set of “meta-rules,” together constituting a First Deep Transition that produced industrial modernity along with its ecological and social costs.
Meeting today’s crises, they argue, requires a Second Deep Transition: changing not just individual systems but the underlying meta-rules that drive them. The framework builds on the Multi-Level Perspective and on Carlota Perez’s techno-economic paradigms and “great surges of development.”